After three days, fifty presentations, eight live demos and the consumption of significant quantities of food and drink, the curtain came down on the STAR European Conference 2009. Held a short distance from CD-adapco's London headquarters, the conference defied the current economic situation by attracting a near record attendance of over 300 attendees, drawn from all sections of industry and from every discipline in the CAE world.
In his opening address, CD-adapco President Steve MacDonald, was buoyant about the economic crisis and its impact on the CAE business: “My strong belief is that the current economic situation presents a fantastic opportunity to CD-adapco and the CAE community as a whole. In the midst of constant reminders about how tough times are, CD-adapco managed to grow at 22% last year, a performance that we have matched through the first five months of our current financial year. I am convinced that CAE is absolutely the right place to be right now, as more and more companies look to adopt simulation technology as part of a drive towards lean-engineering. With both STAR-CCM+ and STAR-CD V4 now fully online and accepted by the marketplace, we have a busy time ahead of us working out all of the ways that we can deploy this exciting technology throughout the engineering process, reducing costs and increasing innovation as we go.”
The central theme of the conference, which was sponsored by Dell, Cray, FieldView and Microsoft, was “Integrate. Automate. Innovate”. Led by excellent keynote presentations from Bombardier Aerospace and Access, a succession of industrial clients demonstrated the tangible benefits that can be gained from adopting an automation philosophy in their industrial CAE processes.
A good example of driving innovation through automation, was presented by Vestas, the world’s leading wind-energy company, who demonstrated how their entire CFD process had been distilled into a single “Run CFD button”. Using the button, any Vestas site engineer, located anywhere in the world, can produce a report detailing the suitability of a region of terrain for wind turbine deployment, including visualization of the flow field in Google Earth. For more information on CD-adapco conferences, webinars, seminars and events please visit: www.cd-adapco.com/events
